One of the problems faced by many network engineers is reducing the network data flowing across limited-bandwidth network connections. One way to effectively transmit more data through such a limited-bandwidth connection is to compress the data at the sending device prior to sending, and decompress the data at the receiving device after the compressed data has been transmitted over the connection.
Unfortunately, compression is not always the best solution. For example, in some circumstances, the overhead associated with compressing and decompressing the data may be greater than the benefit achieved by sending the data in compressed format. Thus, systems that always compress data, and systems that never compress data, are likely to experience situations in which they are operating inefficiently. Further, even in systems that support both modes of operation, it is difficult to determine which setting to use. Even when an administrator is able to determine the best overall mode, configuring the device to use that mode may still result in inefficiency during some network transmission operations.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.